Food, funds and faith needed to help stem the African famine

Earlier this month, the front page of “The New York Times” ran a photo of a severely malnourished child in Mogadishu, Somalia, and estimated more than 500,000 Somali children are verging on starvation. Two days later, the same front page showed a woman trying on a pair of $1,495 Louis Vuitton shoes at Bergdorf Goodman’s in Manhattan.

What a contrast! Nearly 12 million people in the horn of Africa can be affected by the severe drought and famine and life goes on in parts of the world unmoved by this enormous potential loss of life. We waste food every day and are combating an epidemic of childhood obesity in the U.S., while geography can determine whether a child can even live until he is 5-years-old.

FILE PHOTOA SEVERELY MALNOURISHED child who has been connected to an IV sits with her mother while waiting for further medical assistance from "The Gift of the Givers" at a makeshift medical camp for famine stricken Somalis in the Hawlwadag district, Mogadishu, Somalia, earlier this month.

The Catholic bishops of Kenya, which borders on Somalia and has opened refugee camps for those fleeing the violence and drought, said, “We appeal to you Kenyans and international relief agencies, humanitarian agencies to join hands in solidarity to ensure that these Kenyans do not continue suffering from starvation and hunger,” according to the Catholic Information Service for Africa. They noted that food is being wasted in other parts of Kenya that can be directed to the starving people.

And the extremist Islamic groups in Somalia, who do not want Western aid, have been massacring mostly men, who accept aid from these humanitarian groups. This is one of the things that Bread For the World, an American hunger group, has identified, and claims is a major cause for starvation.

FILE PHOTOA SOMALIAN REFUGEE cradles her son at a refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya, earlier this month. Somalia and parts of Kenya have been struck by one of the worst droughts and famines in six decades, with more than 350,000 refugees finding shelter in the worlds biggest refugee camp.

In their book, “Grace at the Table,” David Beckmann and Arthur Simon wrote, “One direct way (of fighting) is by using food as a weapon. Armies sometimes try to starve the enemy by destroying crops and blocking the delivery of emergency supplies.”

Bread for the World, started by Arthur Simon in 1974, has had enormous impact on relating the cause of hunger to national and international politics and economic policies. Though “Grace at the Table,” is more than a decade old, it is vital reading to understand the intricacy of hunger in the world and how many entities need to come together to address the issue.

Simon was a Lutheran pastor in the lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1960’s and early 70’s and became increasingly aware of the hungry people all around him. He and his wife made a volunteer trip through southern U.S. states and discovered children who were dying from worm infestation or who were only given milk to drink a few times a month. When Bread for the World was founded, its members began to lobby members of Congress to address the problem of hunger in America.

They also had a good friend in Paulist Press, the largest Catholic publishing house in the U.S., headquartered in N.J., which not only published, “Bread for the Word,” a 180-page paperback in 1975, but also sent it free to all the 17,000 Catholic parishes at the time. They also promised to send as many free copies as any parish needed. This public relations gimmick put the organization on the top, sold tens of thousands of copies and elicited thousands of new members. At its pinnacle, Bread for the World, had over 60,000 paying members.

Simon recounts the expansion of the organization in his semi-autobiography, “The Rising of Bread for the World.” As Simon looks back he boasts, “Our mission was to attract Christians across denominational political lines to press the nation’s leaders for policies to reduce hunger.” They can claim many victories especially to keep the program WIC (providing staples like milk, cheese and bread to women with infants and children) fully funded.

The potential loss of life in Africa today may be the worst famine to challenge the world’s resources. The food and resources are there; it just takes the will of the world community to remove the terrorists and to feed and shelter the hungry. Each of us can and must do something.